Martian Archaeology

Martian Archaeology, a meditation on imagination and knowledge, was a 2014 Twang Darkly multimedia show of live performance with animation, with the material also released as album and DVD. It was the first music I created to feature my hand-built chromatic dulcimers.

Martian Archaeology (2014)
Rural space music for the Red Planet — a meditation on imagination and discovery.

Our remote electronic eyes portray only Martian desoloation: dry lands and fading dreams of life. But Mars of Old lives in truer tales recovered by Earthlings of imagination. Mars of Old lives, ages bent through the stranger lens of Martian Archaeology...

I created the animations with various combinations of my own macro photographs of rocks in the Calico Basin and Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area of Nevada (where I later would serve as 2015 Artist-In-Residence) alongside of public domain photographs of various archaeological relics from ancient Persia and other areas of the our own world. Naturally, I used some publicly available NASA resources as well. And our inspiration Sun Ra makes a few "guest appearances" in the films thanks to the magic of cut-out animation... and his enduring power.